TechDays St. Petersburg 2010, a quick recap - Solaris Rss

This is a discussion on TechDays St. Petersburg 2010, a quick recap - Solaris Rss ; I have now participated to several Tech Days in Saint Petersburg and it's impressive to see the constant growth in attendance (4000+ participants this year!) and interest for Java EE and GlassFish. It's getting harder every year to get off ...

TechDays St. Petersburg 2010, a quick recap

I have now participated to several Tech Days in Saint Petersburg and it's impressive to see the constant growth in attendance (4000+ participants this year!) and interest for Java EE and GlassFish. It's getting harder every year to get off the stage with the number of people asking questions ;)

On the first day I made my way into the "technology showcase" demos right before the keynote to show GlassFish v3 update center and development features (basically a combination of this and that). Unfortunately James couldn't make it so Octavian Tanase, VP of client Java develpoment (I hope I'm getting his title right) delivered a Java (SE, VM, JavaFX) keynote, leaving the server-side part to Oracle's Dennis Leung on the next day. Jerome then presented in the main room in front of about a thousand people about where we are with GlassFish and as expected could leave the room for a while after the talk given all the questions.

Later on the first day I had two back-to-back sessions on Java EE 6, using the same approach as in Devoxx, jFokus and other JUG events, based on code and demos from beginningee6.kenai.com. The final part on CDI was taken care of by Jerome on the next day. The keynote on the second day was almost as packed as for the opening one and was delivered by Dennis Leung, Oracle VP of software development. This one was more focused on Java EE, evolution and modularity of the platforms, a demo by Jerome (with some French humor), some very nice words on GlassFish being rock-solid, and closing with the Oracle value-adds such a TopLink, Coherence and the larger WebLogic-based Fusion Middleware application grid offering.

From the few local people I talked to it seems that Dennis' talk was well accepted and it was certainly quite effective to have an Oracle exec speaker deliver messages such as "we take the stewardship for Java role very seriously" or the GlassFish Roadmap. Maybe the most important thing for me was that after all this event was not so much different from the previous Sun-led TechDays.